


Rabbit Heart

by Trojie



Category: Bandom, Electric Century, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Grief/Mourning, Jaegers (Pacific Rim), M/M, Mental Link, Not Really Character Death, Past Drug Addiction, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 15:55:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13954968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trojie/pseuds/Trojie
Summary: For no_tags Spring 2018:Prompt 1. Pete/Gerard (or Pete & Gerard) - Here be Dragons





	Rabbit Heart

**Author's Note:**

> In my defence I've been saying this pairing were 'drift compatible' forever. Thanks to the prompter for giving me the forum in which to prove it <3

The loss-of-signal white noise on Lacey doesn't even register with Gerard at first. Everyone's cheering the defeat of yet another kaiju - Smaug, for god's sake, they must be running out of names - yelling and whooping and fists in the air, Gerard included, and then -

Choi's voice doesn't cut through the celebration, it underrides it somehow. 'I've lost Debiak,' he says, professional, emotionless, void. Gerard, on the hangar floor, freezes. 'No response from Way, either. Lacey's comms are weak. Guys, can we - okay shut the fuck up, everyone,' and slowly the room is going quiet and cold and Gerard - a statue, a prayer, a snapped thread of hope - still isn't really hearing it. 

His ears are roaring. 

'That's affirmative. Confirmed kill at oh seven hundred thirty five, loss-of-signal at oh seven hundred and thirty eight.'

The jaeger Electric Century, fondly known to her pilots as Lacey, goes down in the records as missing in action somewhere in the Aleutians. One kill, the class four kaiju known as Smaug, to her credit. Dave Debiak and Mikey Way get empty casket funerals two days later. 

Gerard Way, jaeger program washout, keeps working ground crew at the Shatterdome, because there's a war on.

***

_Six months earlier_

Spinning, the world is spinning and spinning and spinning and they told him the drift would be different, disorienting, til they found each other in the wash of their memories, and got grounded, but … this isn't new. 

This is too fucking familiar, this buzz, this swim of bright colours and this loose, free feeling. This sour-cherry edge of nausea in his gut, this warm numb feeling in his throat. It could be his memory, it could be something from years ago, before he dried out, before they even thought about volunteering for the program - except that he recognises the flooring under his feet, with the obsessed patternseeking of the truly wasted, and this is in the Shatterdome mess. 

'Gee -'

Mikey, in his pilot's suit, plastic exoskeleton all nauseatingly perfect on him, grabs Gerard by the shoulders before he can go to his knees from dizziness. 'Don't,' Mikey's saying, shaking him. 'C'mon, don't chase it, Gee, come back to me, c'mon, we got this.'

The rabbit. Gerard is chasing the rabbit. The white rabbit, hahaha, how very Jefferson Airplane. 

_One pill makes you small,_ round and round in his head. _One pill makes you small, one pill. One pill makes you small._ Alice in Wonderland is about math, you know. Not drugs. Gerard always got annoyed about that, back when books were the worst thing he had to get annoyed about and spend too much time awake itching about. When rabbitholes were geometrical allegories and dragons were metaphors for the state of humanity, that didn't rampage through cities, didn't bleed neon blue and poison the water they died in.

'Gee, we gotta do this, c'mon, we've got to - the bridge is gonna fail if you don't come _on_.'

Except it's not. The neural bridge between them is strong, ferocious and burning, unkillable, because oh yes, they're alike alright, they're too much alike. 

'When?' Gerard slurs, falling into Mikey in a shirr of loud polymer clicks. 'Mikes, I'm gonna be sick.'

'It isn't real, it's a memory,' Mikey says, hauling at him like they can leave this party that's all in their heads somehow, like there's a door out of here. 'Gerard, please.'

'You said you stopped,' Gerard whispers. He's going to throw up in his bubble helmet. This is like lucid dreaming, he knows he's dreaming but he can't stop. 'What did you -'

Will it be real puke?

'It wasn't a big deal,' says Mikey. 'I just needed to loosen up, that's all, Gee, I swear, it's just been a hard few months and I needed to unwind. You weren't there,' he says desperately. 'I didn't think you'd -'

Everything is shaking. The party crawls up the walls and Gerard's stomach drops between his knees to splat on the floor like something out of a horror movie, but all in his head. A bad trip, a bad bad trip down memory lane -

Someone else grabs at Gerard. Someone not in a pilot's suit - in civvies, loose and rumpled, sweaty like he's been dancing. 

'Pete, no,' says Mikey - but the phantom Pete Wentz can't hear the real Mikey, and he puts his hands on Gerard like he knows him, like he's done it before and will do it again. He's happy and he's drunk and Gerard is - is so -

The world swirls, like a gravity inversion or pulling serious Gs in a flight harness, and then Gerard has Pete up against a wall and Pete has his hands all over Gerard's ass and Gerard is too wasted to follow the whys and wherefores but oh, Pete's smile. That's all the reason he needs, surely.

Pete's mouth is so sweet.

'Gee, _please_ -' Mikey sounds desperate.

 _Simulation terminated_ says the trainer jaeger's system computer, and abruptly they're back in their tech cocoon and Mikey's two feet away from him again, ensnared in tubes and patch cables and still reaching out to him. 

Gerard can't meet his eyes. They unhook him from the suit and it takes everything in him not to fall to his knees and retch his guts out all over the floor. 

Five years clean, five years sober. Gerard always knew if he was going to break his pledge it would be because of Mikey, but he didn't think it would happen and if it did, he didn't think it would be like this.

***

_Now_

'Your brother's effects,' says Pentecost, solemnly, like everything he says is solemn (or pissed. Their marshall does a very good line in pissed, Gerard has to admit). He hands Gerard an old steel ammo box with basically no ceremony whatsoever. 'We thank you for his service.'

Gerard considers punching Marshall Pentecost in the mouth, and doesn't do it, and doesn't respond, either, just does some approximation of a salute and shuffles off. 

He shouldn't feel as weird and invasive as he does, curled up in his bunk around the box, steeling himself to open it. He's already been forced through the magical mystery tour of Mikey's brain. But Mikey invited him in for that, whether he knew it was gonna go the way it did or not. That was a whole other thing, but he locked _this_ shit up private and, presumably, never intended Gerard to have the key. 

The room still spins on Gerard sometimes, sometimes he feels like he's having the DTs again even though there's nothing in his system to detox from, except failure, memory, hands on his ass that knew him except it wasn't him and they weren't real. 

It feels like Mikey's watching him when he opens the box. 

Inside: a ball-chain necklace with a charm dangling on it. An old pair of glasses, even though Mikey'd had surgery years ago and didn't need them any more. Passport, wallet, keys to an apartment he'll never go back to and probably Gerard never will either. Some of Gerard's drawings - kaiju, sketched from news reports; their old house from when they were growing up; a little parade of cartoon zombies crawling across the bottom of an otherwise boring page torn out of the Basic Training manual. 

A photo: Pete in his ground crew uniform, Mikey with one arm slung around his shoulder. The passing out parade - Gerard remembers this, he's got a similar photo in his own box of him and Mikey, one of him and Ray, too. He sifts through the papers and finds those pictures, and Mikey's certification for piloting, and the results of his last medical. Private things and triumphs, good luck charms.

His fingertips light on soft sheet-plastic, tiny swelling bumps, and he pulls something out. Pills: two of them, unmarked, in an equally unmarked ziplock bag. They drop from his suddenly nerveless fingers back where they came from. 

The Mikey in his head rolls his eyes.

Gerard shoves the box under his bunk and tries to pretend he never saw the inside of his brother's brain, never lived his brother's high, never tasted his brother's hookup. He breathes into his pillow - breathes his pillow in - and then pushes himself up, away from temptation. Back on shift. 

***

Gerard almost drops a torque wrench into a turbo intake on a new build on the Construction floor, and his supervisor orders him off shift. Gerard doesn't tell him he signed up for the swing shift in Maintenance and quietly just dusts off his coverall and moves hangars. 

He does this twice before he hits the same supervisor again, and gets an earful and an escort back to the barracks. 

'Dude, I'm fine,' says Gerard, and that doesn't help because you're not supposed to address your superior officers as 'dude'. Gerard's always been shitty at hierarchy. But he's _right_. They're working to a deadline here. It's the deadline of 'before another fucking lizard monster comes through an interdimensional portal and kills people'. That's the kind of timeline that motivates a guy, y'know.

Also Gerard just can't fucking sleep, and it's better to not waste time if you can't sleep in it. Right? 

'Way, if you don't fucking lie down for long enough that you can operate a soldering iron without burning the Shatterdome down, I'm gonna have you demobbed and kicked out into the street. Don't make me do something I don't want to do.'

Gerard gets pushed into his bunk with his supervisor's hand on the top of his head like he's getting put in a cop car. The atmosphere is about the same, too. 'Fucking sleep,' is the parting shot before he's left alone.

But he's had so much shitty coffee his eyeballs are vibrating, and he's sure he'll never, ever sleep, not tonight, he's so fucking wired -

\- but he still startles like motherfuck, must have zoned out, when someone crawls into his bunk on top of him some amount of time later, all feet and hands and weight in the wrong places.

He almost says _Mikey?_ and then his heart cracks, because it can't be, it can't, but it feels so familiar. Then he gets mad, a split second later, because how fucking dare someone, how dare they? 'Get off me, asshole, get out, get the fuck out -' he starts to push, because there's not enough room to punch, and the intruder grapples with him frantically for a minute before getting his wrists tightly. 

Gerard is about to fucking start biting - but then:

'Please,' says a voice that isn't familiar to Gerard but is, hollowly, familiar. 

_'Pete?'_

'He used to let me - when I couldn't sleep,' says Pete, and there's sickly, badly-fermented alcohol on his breath. Gerard's stomach turns, sour on coffee already and then this. It's too soon, it's too much. Gerard shakes for wanting what he can't have. The neural bridge leaves baggage, they don't tell you that. Gerard couldn't look Mikey in the eye for a week after they flunked their test run, because his head kept spinning, because he kept feeling Pete like a phantom limb, because he kept _aching_ for shit he'd detoxed from.

'I'm not Mikey,' says Gerard. 'And you're drunk.' The real Mikey can't come to the phone right now, but Mikey's phantom in Gerard's brain knows what to do with a squirming Wentz, and pulls him close. At least this way he can't knee Gerard in the kidneys. 

Pete's breath is wet against Gerard's chest through his thin sleep shirt. 

Gerard thinks about the box under the bed, and where Mikey got the little bag, and the expression on his face in the photo, like he had everything he wanted right where he wanted it. Pete just looked poleaxed, stunned, disbelieving of his luck. 

He's very warm. Gerard slides his hand down Pete's smooth, sweaty back, and Pete makes a soft noise, burrows closer. He tips his face up to touch his mouth to the soft place under Gerard's jaw.

It isn't Gerard that wants this. Whatever 'this' is. Gerard doesn't want good things, and this … weight and stability? The way the keloid trace of Mikey in Gerard's hippocampus shifts its focus from the tiny bag under the bed to the delicate curve of Pete's slack mouth? No. That's not Gerard's style of desire. If it was, he wouldn't have needed to go cold turkey from the things he craved in the first place.

He doesn't move, he doesn't stop Pete but he doesn't do anything back, no kissing, no touching other than the hold he has on him. It's static, a still life. A portrait of a bad decision that isn't a worse decision. Gerard falls asleep, probably out of self defence more than anything, and wakes with Pete's fingers edged into the waistband of his underwear, and has to wriggle free to piss and to … not be there in that hard bed, so close to all that incendiary material, in no-man's land. 

The unexplored country of Mikey's life, the space between him and people who weren't Gerard, that Gerard should not know about. Tiny bags, baggage, and y'know? Some things should stay locked up. Some parts of the map weren't meant to be filled in, were meant to stay 'here be dragons' in warning. 

Explorers sometimes get eaten. 

Beware. 

***

Gerard changes shifts frequently but Pete always seems to change with him, like a remora fish. Like two remora fish, because neither of them has the purpose of a shark, but they stick to each other and Pete sweats against Gerard's skin in their off hours, crammed into a bunk, too hot and too much, so much too much.

His mouth finds Gerard's throat again and again in the throes of sleep, his eyelashes flutter against Gerard's skin. His weight keeps Gerard from reaching into Mikey's steelboxed plastic-wrapped remains and trying to pull out another rabbithole to fall down.

***

_'Gerard, c'mon, Gerard - Gerard -'_

'Mikey?' Gerard says groggily, nausea burning his throat, and Pete's face comes into focus. There's something fierce in his eyes. 

'Yeah,' he breathes. Before Gerard can even blink he launches in, no more preamble. 'They got a signal. From Lacey. They got a fucking signal -' and Gerard's heart starts to hammer. To thunder, painfully.

'Who are they sending out after her?' he asks, trying to sit up and nearly braining Pete in the process. Pete grabs at him, fingernails hard against his collarbones. He's feral, in the permanent faint light of the barracks, enough to see fumble your way to bed by but not enough to keep you awake, supposedly. Fierce. Spit fire and burn you to the ground. This isn't the soft sunshine Pete of Mikey's party and this isn't the slow sad Pete of the last few weeks. This is a new animal.

'They aren't,' Pete says, and there, the dragon's flash in his eyes, the fury. 'Gerard, they're not fucking sending anyone, they're trying to cover it up. I was on shift in comms when they caught it.'

'What -'

'They aren't gonna tell you,' Pete growls. 'They don't think it's worth the risk if it turns out to be fake, and they don't wanna fuck you up any more than you're already fucked up. They think it's cruel.'

'Why the fuck are you telling me, then?' From thundering blood to something frozen, Gerard collapses inwards. He whispers, not because he cares about volume or because he cares about anything but because his throat is closing up in some kind of shock. 'Why would you fucking - Pete, God, why are you telling me this?'

It _is_ cruel. It's like a knife in the ribs, a hand fisted in his guts, twisting.

'Because we're going,' Pete says. 'We're gonna take that repair job that's sitting in the hangar, and we're going after Lacey ourselves.' He's frantic in Gerard's lap - contained but sparking like a livewire, wildfire, dangerous and unmapped and yet Gerard knows this about him, because Mikey knew. How hard it is to head Pete off at the pass when he has an idea he believes with his whole soul.

'We can't,' says Gerard, aching in his chest. His hands find Pete's hips without his say-so. 'We're not pilots.'

'We could have been.'

'We're not qualified -'

'We both know how to drive a jaeger, Gerard. We both did Basic.'

'We failed!'

'You chased the rabbit, I'm a headcase, sure, whatever,' says Pete, so easily it's unreal. 'Just means we're not ideal candidates. They've got enough volunteers that they can wash people like us out right now, but that doesn't mean we aren't capable.'

'We aren't _compatible_ ,' Gerard tries. He strokes Pete's waist, more to ground himself than anything else, because he wants - he wants to believe what Pete's saying, that they can do this, that they have a shot, but. 'Pete, we can't drift,'

Pete straight up laughs in his face.

'Bullshit, Way. You and me? We'll drift just fine.'

***

The hangar isn't quiet during the nightshift but it's quieter. They put their coveralls on and make it to the repair job, the unnamed jaeger Pete swears down is fit to run again. Gerard hasn't worked on this one in a week or so so he's not sure, but everything looks fine when they get in there, and start to try and struggle into the pilot suits.

It's been a while. The bones on the inside of Gerard feel like liquid and lead though so strapping into the exoskeleton is good, is helpful, is keeping him focused. You're supposed to have techs help you with this. You're supposed to have people like Pete and Gerard help you with this. They just have each other, checking snaps and adjusting straps, and praying.

Gerard starts to shiver.

'Don't rabbit,' Pete says. He grabs Gerard's face in both hands, both of them half-dressed, half-ready. He taps his skull, taps Gerard's temple. 'Whatever you see - don't chase it, Gerard. We're gonna see the real Mikey soon, okay, just don't … don't follow him up here, in all this mess.'

'Pete, I don't know if -'

Pete presses their foreheads together. 'There's so much shit in here,' he says. 'But I trust you. Gerard, are you hearing me? I need you, and I trust you.'

Gerard doesn't know if he trusts Pete, but … Mikey did. That will be - has to be - enough.

'Yeah, okay,' he breathes. 

The fear kicks back in when their helmets go on, though, when they have to basically do the equivalent of hotwiring the jaeger to get it to run, and the engines come online in a roar of dust and diesel. 

The radio, hooked into system-wide comms, comes to life - _mayday, mayday, mayday_ in Mikey's voice, on loop, weak and fake sounding compared to the Mikey-shade on Gerard's shoulder, but there. A beacon, but Gerard barely has time to register it before the muscle fibres start to catch and shake, awaiting orders, and then, finally, the neural bridge flares like magnesium, red-bright. Gerard hears Pete gasp next to him and they slam into the drift together, uncontrolled and unregulated and -

\- and it's exhilarating, an avalanche to ride, a tidal wave to surf. A jaeger to pilot.

Gerard barely even notices Choi and Pentecost trying to order them not to leave.

***

They don't notice when the water starts to come in. There's supposed to be an alarm. There's supposed to be failsafes, there's supposed to be someone in their earpieces telling them what to do - but they busted out of the Shatterdome by themselves in a jaeger that hadn't been signed off by the safety people yet. No safety nets for pioneers. Just the radio.

 _-ayday, mayday, mayday -_.

They're flying high in the drift, higher than Gerard's ever flown before no matter what he was on, in perfect synch, when his foot comes down - and it splashes. Here inside the jaeger, it splashes, and he slips.

The whiplash is violent. Gerard's almost thrown out of the drift by the dissonance, and Pete clutches for him, mentally and physically, fighting the reach of the hookups plugged into their suits.

'Gerard,' he pants, 'C'mon, Gerard, I got you,' and Gerard sobs. Pain rips through his skull for a second and then the drift takes him again but it sucks him down this time, a riptide instead of a ridable wave, and he sinks like a stone. His feet stop moving. The jaeger lurches under them.

'C'mon,' says Mikey, smiling in the back of his brain. Not the Mikey of Gerard's memories, not even the construct of Mikey that took up residence out of _Mikey's_ memories. 

Pete's Mikey. It has to be. Mikey never smiled that tight, flirtatious little smile at Gerard, never moved like water like this the way he does in this memory, leading Gerard-as-Pete somewhere down into the dark. Down the rabbithole, like Alice.

'Don't,' says Pete softly, urgently. 'Hey. Listen to me, Gerard, don't go with him, don't.'

Mikey's so - Gerard misses him so much. He catches Gerard's - Pete's - wrist and tugs, and Gerard goes a few steps. He _misses him_ -

'I know, and you're gonna see him again soon, the real Mikey, we just gotta keep walking, keep the jaeger going, Gerard, please.'

_Mayday, mayday, may -_

The groaning of steel under water sounds like horror. Bulging, knocking noises, creaking. The pressure outside is crushing, the pressure in Gerard's head is worse. Mikey's fingertip plays against the fine blue veins of Gerard's forearm that belongs to Pete. Ink shimmers in and out of his vision like one of those magic-eye puzzles. 

Pete's gauntleted hand closes around Gerard's real forearm, the one here, the one that isn't controlling his side of the jaeger, and Gerard startles. The drift, fragile, trembles between them. 

'Walk with me,' Pete says, and Gerard raises his eyes and takes one halting step with his heavy, booted feet, and something shudders in the metal underneath them. The jaeger takes its own step.

Two hands overlap on Gerard's arm. 

Mikey pouts. Gerard's brain is a throbbing mass of welts at the sight of him, the feel of him skin under skin. 'It's been too long,' Mikey says softly, words not for Gerard, that were never said to Gerard. 'Come on, I know a place.'

The thing that clangs against them clangs again. Gerard is hypnotised, frozen again. Rabbit sees hawk. 

_\- day, mayday, ma-_

Pete's fingers twine with his, clacking plastic together. 'We're walking,' he says. His voice is so soft and so sure. 'Gerard, walk with me. We're going to find your brother. He's waiting for us. We just have to keep walking.'

His hands are shaking. _Gerard's_ hands are shaking. He raises his foot, and brings it down. Step, step, step. Splash, splash, splash. Mikey's crooked smile fades and Pete's reappears, through the bubble of his helmet. 

_Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is PJC one-oh-nine Electric Century, we are taking on water -_

Mikey.

Through the drift, Pete smiles and Gerard smiles back.

There's no map for where they're going and there are dragons ahead, dragons in the drift. But they keep walking, because they have to get there.


End file.
